How do I add an already existing web application to Sharepoint?

Question

I created a virtual directory for the Default Site in IIS that referred to the directory where my web site was located.

Everything was working well, since the Default Site listened to Port 80, the web application was working correctly.

At some point, Sharepoint was installed on the server on which I was working, disabling the Default Site, and enabling "Sharepoint - 80" which listens to Port 80.

It does not seem that there was any other configuration done with Sharepoint, other than installing it.

What's the correct method of adding an already existing website that was created separately from Sharepoint?

Answer 1

Use a different URL for SharePoint and configure 'SharePoint - 80' to listen for only that host name. I.e. configure your sharepoint to be something like sp.company.com and then set the bindings in IIS for the sharepoint site to look for only that specific host name. Likewise, you will need to configure the bindings for your other site to also listen for a specific host name so that it doesn't interfere with SharePoint.

However, if your SharePoint environment is going to be of any significant size, you will probably want to avoid sharing a server between SharePoint and other web apps. SharePoint can coexist with other web apps, but doing so makes troubleshooting performance issues and outages an absolute nightmare. SharePoint also has a rather large resource footprint and can choke other apps, particularly on the typical resource-starved virtual machine.